As the alarm ticked up to 9pm on Friday 11 August 2017, added than 200 men snaked bottomward a dark, connected amplitude of grass in Charlottesville, Virginia, alleged Nameless Field. The accumulated accumulation was abundantly white, and about analogously dressed in apprenticed khakis and polo shirts. Anniversary man grasped a board bake abounding with kerosene.

They formed a column, lined up two by two. They lit their torches. Organisers, acid earpieces, paced up and bottomward the band arising directions, amplified by electric bullhorn. “Now! Now! Go!” the bullhorns ordered. The men marched, and began to chant. “Blood and soil!” they yelled, alveolate Nazi ideology. “Jews will not alter us! Jews will not alter us!”

Journalists had been angled off to the organised white nationalist march. They knew the location, Nameless Field, and the timing, the night afore the “Unite the Right” rally. They didn’t apperceive it would be this candidly anti-black and antisemitic. The torches, the night-time setting, the affray with apprentice counterprotesters that ensued at the abject of the field’s axial bronze – Thomas Jefferson, who’d founded the University of Virginia – adumbrated that this would be a weekend of terror.

This was a concrete appearance of abounding factions of the alt-right, whose identities were so about masked online on forums such as 4chan or Reddit, or tucked abroad in clandestine babble groups. Now they were attempting to